Nearly 300 participants met digitally for this year’s DigiMed Bayern Symposium "Translational Medicine in the Digital Era" on March 16th to 18th. 21 renowned speakers and participants from the international digital health sector presented and discussed about data-driven medicine and its potentials – for patients, for science, for the health system, for the economy and for the society.
Bavarian Minister of Health and Care, Klaus Holetschek, welcomed all participants and underlined the importance and relevance of innovation and application of key technologies such as AI for personalized medicine. Especially in the difficult time during the COVID-19 pandemic, it would be fatal to ignore other clinical indications such like cardiovascular diseases. DigiMed Bayern, as a lighthouse project on P4 medicine with over 22.5 million Euro, is funded by the Bavarian State Ministry of Health and Care for good reason. He particularly emphasized the great potential of patient-centric and application-oriented clinical research and health care.
The online symposium was delivered in three topic-specific sessions:
- Day 1: Translation of cardiovascular research using digital approaches
- Day 2: Medical benefits based on clinical application of multi-omics approaches
- Day 3: Bioinformatics and digital solutions for translational medicine
Prof. Heribert Schunkert, Scientific Director of DigiMed Bayern, thanked all speakers as well as the members of the Scientific Advisory Board and the audience for the stimulating presentations and discussion: “The philosophy of DigiMed Bayern is to use digital tools to improve healthcare processes and address patient needs. This project makes very good progress and, also based on the feedback received from the symposium, I am highly optimistic that we are on a good track."
“The long-term goal of DigiMed Bayern is to pave the way for the generation, storage and analysis of patients’ derived data,” stated Prof. Horst Domdey, coordinator of DigiMed Bayern. “At the end of the day, a careful exploitation of these data will not only improve but also save the lives of thousands of people, alone in Germany.”
Please find released video recordings as well as presentations of the symposium on the DigiMed Bayern Website: www.digimed-bayern.de/en/symposium
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About DigiMed Bayern:
The lighthouse P4-medicine project DigiMed Bayern was launched at the end of 2018 with more than € 20 million funding by the Bavarian State Ministry of Health and Care. DigiMed Bayern combines comprehensive datasets of patients diagnosed with atherosclerotic diseases, such as coronary heart disease and stroke, or with genetic risk factors. These data with additional corresponding epidemiological datasets will be further enriched with state-of-the-art multi-dimensional molecular characterization (-omics technologies) of associated sample material. Health insurance and sociological data complement the picture. For the integrative analysis of the resulting "Big Data", a secure, compliant, scalable and sustainable IT-infrastructure will be fundamentally designed, implemented and applied. Patients and persons at risk will benefit from advancements in disease risk prediction, targeted prevention, diagnosis and treatment.
The scientific leader of DigiMed Bayern is Prof. Heribert Schunkert, Director of the Department of Cardiovascular Diseases at the German Heart Centre Munich. BioM Biotech Cluster Development GmbH as the central network organization for the biotechnology sector in Munich and Bavaria is responsible for management and project coordination.